The first Web 2.0 innovations helped us make new connections on a global scale. The rise of location-aware tools, linked with the growing ubiquity of real-time, social, and mobile, is swinging the pendulum back to the human and local scale.

Location has permeated our collective wisdom, informing our online and in-person experiences, our business models, and our ability to change the world. Location information is a force for both opportunity and disruption, ready to explode our assumptions about the limits of the internet operating system.

The dramatic increase in the number of products, companies, and people affected by the expansion of location technologies has shaped the 2010 edition of Where 2.0 into three distinct, simultaneous tracks:

It's not just consumers who have taken to the increased access to information on their hand-held devices. Businesses, institutions, and organizations are all becoming significant players in the mobile arena along all points of the global-local axis, building multiplatform services on the cheap. Smartphones and other devices equipped with mapping apps are forcing stand-alone navigational devices—and their business model—into obsolescence.

Meanwhile, corporate behemoths are taking the "location is everywhere" mantra to new heights. Apple, with its recent geo acquisitions and overtures to Microsoft, is positioned to compete head-on with Google for location domination.

Mass consumer adoption of mapping and location-aware technologies has inspired restaurants and Main Street merchants to use tools like foursquare and Yelp to drive new traffic. Are local search and advertising tools really making money, even in this down economy?

Happening March 30-April 1, 2010 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, California, Where 2.0 brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. Join with developers, technologists, CTOs, researchers, geographers, academics, business developers, and entrepreneurs to debate what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar. Learn more about Where 2.0.